This latest work features characters pursuing fresh starts, struggling to escape drugs or toxic relationships, only to witness hope devolve into violence. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", rendering it willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Phrases such as "He could make a fresh start" and "They chose to begin anew" are scattered across the narrative. At the same time, she seems to be making her individual reinvention, since this appears a different type of work – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. However it turns out to be packed with the same dilemmas and aesthetics as her previous works.
From Chance Novelist to Iconic Work
Chris Kraus was originally an visual artist who became a writer unintentionally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, which was composed of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, transforming personal female narrative from abjection into defiance. She persisted as a writer, but the following three compelling and abrasive novels missed the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style infused into the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her identity as a renegade artist who had evolved into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on real estate deals. It follows that she now wants to experiment with fresh narrative sources, directing her gaze to the experiences of others, at a period in which she states that Trumpian politics turns intimate literature obsolete.
Three Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, encompassing several time periods – all unable to escape their histories. There is the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, representations of the author's parents, moving from the New York borough to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the narrative of the author, in the guise of Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her partner struggling with addiction her husband Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a town long abandoned by forward-thinking policies only a brief drive from Catt's cottage in a remote part of Minnesota.
As a reader fond of refined literature of the kind the author herself often avoids, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the first section.
As someone who reads who favors honed writing of the kind that Kraus herself often disregards, I was won over by the novelistic voice of the initial part. It exhibits a new quality of attentiveness that accommodates small details, like the bucket that the protagonist as a child pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, helped by her beloved father. "I found an ice toy!" she says; "a nice toy", he responds, "the elliptical meanings of words tumbling in their mouths like piece candy". Kraus writes Emma's narrative with inquiry and familiarity. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was bound to become frustrated when I wished this fresh tone could last out the book. The author states here that she resents the enjoyment those who appreciate polished prose have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to disruption, to the untidy aesthetics she has in common with her hero author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels reasserts itself in the middle section. Catt is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while traveling between two different states, unable to aid her husband curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as her spouse cycles through underfunded jobs as an substance abuse counselor in a environment driven by the anger and fear that powers a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about the protagonist facing cancellation on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "author" to "landlord" on a reference site. Kraus still seems to be overly concerned about this. At one point she remarks that she's looking into the killing so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would overlook entirely".
The Murder Narrative
Then we reach to the homicide in question – and the referenced day passed by the deceased with the killer and his companions. Kraus has great source material, and reconstructs step by step what happened when a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after connecting via an application where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day in the company of her associates, loitering getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by her romantic interest a man named Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has repeatedly received inpatient care for fits of anger.
Obsession and Unfinished Business
Catt gets obsessed by the account, and I found myself captivated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. Yet I wished her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The standout figure is the character Brittney, who comes alive in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual spiraling out of control in a troubled, forgotten town. The author informs us that Catt converses with Brittney in prison, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the point that her narrative ends almost mid-par
